Lorraine Hansberry and Robert Nemiroff

. . .It grows out of a thought of mine, as I study history, that virtually all of us are what circumstances allow us to be and that it really doesn’t matter whether you are talking about the oppressed or the oppressor. An oppressive society will dehumanize and will dehumanize and degenerate everyone involved—and in certain very poetic and very true ways at the same time it will tend to make if anything the oppressed have more stature—because at least they are arbitrarily placed in the situation of overwhelming that which is degenerate—in this instance the slave society—so that it doesn’t become an abstraction. It has to do with what really happens to all of us in a certain context.

Lorraine Hansberry and Robert Nemiroff at “Village Rallies for NAACP,” in Washington Square Park, June 13, 1959. Photographer unknown. Hansberry was the co-chair of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Life Membership Committee. The rally was to increase membership, raise funds, and to start a Greenwich Village NAACP branch.